Meet the Man Who Created the Iconic Emblem of the Day of the Dead: José Guadalupe Posada

in Art, History, Politics | October 31st, 2023

Odds are you’re acquaint­ed with the lady pic­tured above.

She’s called La Cat­ri­na, and her like­ness adorns count­less t‑shirts and tote bags.

She is a pop­u­lar Hal­loween cos­tume and a main­stay of Day of the Dead cel­e­bra­tions.

She pops up in the ani­mat­ed fam­i­ly fea­ture, Coco, to guide its young hero to the Land of the Dead. 

She’s spent the bet­ter part of a cen­tu­ry mak­ing cameos in numer­ous artists works, most famous­ly Diego Rivera’s sur­re­al 1947 mur­al, Sueño de una Tarde Domini­cal en la Alame­da Cen­tral, a fever dream that places her front and cen­ter, arm in arm with a dis­tin­guished-look­ing, mus­ta­chioed gent in a bowler hat.

That gent is her orig­i­nal cre­ator, José Guadalupe Posa­da, a hard­work­ing print­mak­er and polit­i­cal car­toon­ist who pro­duced over 20,000 images dur­ing his life­time, on sub­jects rang­ing from the Mex­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and oth­er events, both cur­rent and his­tor­i­cal, to pop­u­lar enter­tain­ment and the dai­ly lives of aver­age men and women. 

The artist fre­quent­ly ham­mered his point home by depict­ing the par­ties in his works as calav­eras - exu­ber­ant skele­tons seem­ing­ly unaware they had lost all flesh and blood. 

Posa­da was still a teenag­er in 1871 when a home­town paper picked up his first car­toons. One report­ed­ly enraged a local politi­cian to such a degree that the paper was forced to cease pub­li­ca­tion.

La Cat­ri­na was pub­lished posthu­mous­ly in 1913, as a broad­sheet illus­tra­tion accom­pa­ny­ing a satir­i­cal poem about chick­pea ven­dors. It’s believed that Posa­da intend­ed his image to be a jab at upper class Mex­i­can women obsessed with Euro­pean fash­ions.

(Rivera was the one who changed her name from La Cucaracha — the cock­roach — to the much more lyri­cal La Cat­ri­na. He also plant­ed the seed that Posa­da, who died pen­ni­less and large­ly for­got­ten, had been a rev­o­lu­tion­ary. The Mex­i­can pro­gres­sive print­mak­ing col­lec­tive El Taller Grafi­ca Pop­u­lar took graph­ic inspi­ra­tion from his calav­eras, while embrac­ing and dis­sem­i­nat­ing this myth.

What’s that they say about imi­ta­tion being the sin­cer­est form of flat­tery?

After Posada’s death, his col­leagues at the pub­lish­ing firm of Anto­nio Vane­gas Arroy­or, saved time and mon­ey by con­tin­u­ing to pro­duce work from his blocks and plates. 

As Jim Nikas, found­ing direc­tor of the Posa­da Art Foun­da­tion told Atlas Obscu­ra “If the image was neu­tral enough, you could change the text and use it as an illus­tra­tion for any sto­ry.”

Whether increas­ing pub­lic aware­ness of harm­ful agri­cul­tur­al pes­ti­cides, protest­ing Amer­i­can immi­gra­tion poli­cies, or, uh, sell­ing tequi­la, 21st cen­tu­ry artists, activists, and entre­pre­neurs con­tin­ue to har­ness Posada’s vision for their own pur­pos­es.

Nikas, who sam­pled Posada’s La Calav­era de Don Quixote for an Occu­py Wall Street col­lab­o­ra­tion with Art Hazel­wood and Mar­sha Shaw writes that “the calav­era is some­thing we all have bio­log­i­cal­ly in com­mon and, accord­ing­ly, may be used to con­vey mes­sages:

Posa­da and his pub­lish­ers used depic­tions of calav­eras not only to remind us of our col­lec­tive mor­tal­i­ty but also to shed light. His illus­tra­tions were often satir­i­cal car­i­ca­tures uproot­ed from the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate and used to poke fun at our human con­di­tion. This use was evo­lu­tion­ary, occur­ring over time, and as applic­a­ble today as it was over a cen­tu­ry ago.

See more of José Guadalupe Posada’s calav­eras in the Library of Con­gress’ Prints and Pho­tographs Divi­sion col­lec­tion.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How the CIA Secretly Used Jackson Pollock & Other Abstract Expressionists to Fight the Cold War

in Art, History | October 27th, 2023

What’s the dif­fer­ence between the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca and a cup of yogurt? If you leave the cup of yogurt alone for 200 years, it devel­ops a cul­ture. So goes one of many jokes long in cir­cu­la­tion about the sup­posed Amer­i­can ten­den­cy toward low-mind­ed, expe­di­ent philis­tin­ism. I grant, as an Amer­i­can myself, that such humor sur­rounds at least a grain of truth. But there was a time when the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment of the U.S., an orga­ni­za­tion not often accused of exces­sive high-mind­ed­ness, took an active role in pro­mot­ing the coun­try’s home-grown avant-garde — an appro­pri­ate term, notes Lucie Levine at JSTOR Dai­ly, since it “began as a French mil­i­tary term to describe van­guard troops advanc­ing into bat­tle,” and Amer­i­can mod­ern art had become a con­tin­u­a­tion of pol­i­tics by oth­er means.

“Up until World War II, Amer­i­ca had nev­er pro­duced large, influ­en­tial art move­ments like in Europe,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Con­spir­a­cy of Art video above. After the war, “some­thing unex­pect­ed hap­pened: a brood of rad­i­cal Amer­i­can painters helped make New York City the cen­ter of the art world.”

Mark Rothko, Willem de Koon­ing, and Jack­son Pol­lock: they and oth­er artists “cap­tured the world’s atten­tion with large-scale works of pure col­or and form.” This move­ment came to be known as abstract expres­sion­ism, and in the eyes of the new­ly estab­lished Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, it came to show promise as pro­pa­gan­da. If shown abroad, it could func­tion as pro­pa­gan­da, high­light­ing “the dif­fer­ences between Amer­i­can and Sovi­et pol­i­tics”  — and more specif­i­cal­ly, “the appeal of Amer­i­can cul­ture over Sovi­et Cul­ture.”

“Was Jack­son Pol­lock a weapon in the Cold War?” asks the New York­er’s Louis Menand. While Pol­lock was indeed pro­mot­ed abroad with CIA mon­ey (usu­al­ly pro­vid­ed through lay­ers of orga­ni­za­tion­al mis­di­rec­tion), you don’t look at a paint­ing like Laven­der Mist and “think about ‘artis­tic free enter­prise’ or the CIA, or the cul­tur­al pol­i­tics of Par­ti­san Review. You think about how a painter could have tak­en all he had expe­ri­enced across a cre­ative thresh­old that no one had crossed before, and pro­duced this par­tic­u­lar thing.” But its “impor­tance for a cer­tain strand of Cold War cul­tur­al pol­i­tics is part of the sto­ry of how it got to us, a gen­er­a­tion or more lat­er, and that his­to­ry is worth know­ing.” It’s also worth ask­ing, should the Unit­ed States once again find itself face-to-face with a for­mi­da­ble polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al adver­sary, whether it will be pre­pared to draft a few Pol­locks back into ser­vice.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch “Jack­son Pol­lock 51,” a His­toric Short Film That Cap­tures Pol­lock Cre­at­ing Abstract Expres­sion­ist Art on a Sheet of Glass

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Watch Por­trait of an Artist: Jack­son Pol­lock, the 1987 Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed by Melvyn Bragg

How the CIA Fund­ed & Sup­port­ed Lit­er­ary Mag­a­zines World­wide While Wag­ing Cul­tur­al War Against Com­mu­nism

Was Jack­son Pol­lock Over­rat­ed? Behind Every Artist There’s an Art Crit­ic, and Behind Pol­lock There Was Clement Green­berg

How the CIA Helped Shape the Cre­ative Writ­ing Scene in Amer­i­ca

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Behold Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for Rabelais’ Grotesque Satirical Masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel

in Art, Books, Literature | October 26th, 2023

When François Rabelais came up with a cou­ple of giants to put at the cen­ter of a series of inven­tive and rib­ald works of satir­i­cal fic­tion, he named one of them Gar­gan­tua. That may not sound par­tic­u­lar­ly clever today, gar­gan­tu­an being a fair­ly com­mon adjec­tive to describe any­thing quite large. But we actu­al­ly owe the word itself to Rabelais, or more specif­i­cal­ly, to the near­ly half-mil­len­ni­um-long lega­cy of the char­ac­ter into whom he breathed life. But there’s so much more to Les Cinq livres des faits et dits de Gar­gan­tua et Pan­ta­gru­el, or The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gar­gan­tua and Pan­ta­gru­el, whose endur­ing sta­tus as a mas­ter­piece of the grotesque owes much to its author’s wit, lin­guis­tic vir­tu­os­i­ty, and sheer brazen­ness.

Nor has it hurt that the books have inspired vivid illus­tra­tions from a host of artists, one of whom in par­tic­u­lar stands out: Gus­tave Doré, whom Richard Smyth calls “one of the most pro­lif­ic — and most suc­cess­ful — book illus­tra­tors of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.”

Here at Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured the art he cre­at­ed to accom­pa­ny the work of Dante, Cer­vantes, and Poe, each a writer pos­sessed of a high­ly dis­tinc­tive set of lit­er­ary pow­ers, and each of whom thus received a dif­fer­ent but equal­ly lav­ish and evoca­tive treat­ment from Doré.

For Rabelais, says the site of book deal­er Herib­ert Ten­schert, the 22-year-old artist pro­duced (in 1854) “100 images that oscil­late between the whim­si­cal and the uncan­ny, between real­ism and fan­ta­sy,” a count he would expand to 700 in anoth­er edi­tion two decades lat­er.

You can see a great many of Doré’s illus­tra­tions for Gar­gan­tua and Pan­ta­gru­el at Wiki­me­dia Com­mons. The simul­ta­ne­ous extrav­a­gance and repug­nance of the series’ medieval France may seem impos­si­bly dis­tant to us, but it can hard­ly have felt like yes­ter­day to Doré either, giv­en that he was work­ing three cen­turies after Rabelais.

As sug­gest­ed by Herib­ert Ten­schert, per­haps these imag­i­na­tive visions of the Mid­dle Ages — like Balza­c’s Rabelaisian Les con­tes dro­la­tiques, which he also illus­trat­ed — “res­onat­ed with Doré because they remind­ed him of the mys­te­ri­ous atmos­phere of his child­hood, which he had spent in the mid­dle of the medieval city of Stras­bourg.” What­ev­er his con­nec­tion, Doré cre­at­ed images that still bring to mind a whole range of descrip­tors: somber­ly joc­u­lar, rig­or­ous­ly volup­tuous, com­pelling­ly repel­lent, and above all pan­ta­gru­elist. (Look it up.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus­tave Doré’s Exquis­ite Engrav­ings of Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote

The Adven­tures of Famed Illus­tra­tor Gus­tave Doré Pre­sent­ed in a Fantasic(al) Cutout Ani­ma­tion

Gus­tave Doré’s Dra­mat­ic Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

The Dro­lat­ic Dreams of Pan­ta­gru­el: 120 Wood­cuts Envi­sion the Grotesque Inhab­i­tants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Download 222 Belle Époque Art Posters: An Online Archive of Masterpieces from the “Golden Age of the Poster” (1880–1918)

in Art | October 20th, 2023

Europe at the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth: what a time and place to be alive. Or rather, what a time and place to be alive for peo­ple in the right coun­tries and, more impor­tant­ly, of the right class­es, those who saw a new world tak­ing shape around them and par­took of it with all pos­si­ble hearti­ness. The peri­od between the end of the Fran­co-Pruss­ian War in 1871 and the out­break of World War I in 1914, best known by its French name La Belle Époque, saw not just peace in Europe and empires at their zenith, but all man­ner of tech­no­log­i­cal, social, and cul­tur­al inno­va­tions at home as well.

We here in the 21st cen­tu­ry have few ways of tast­ing the life of that time as rich as its posters, more than 200 of which you can view in high res­o­lu­tion and down­load from the “Art of the Poster 1880–1918,” a Flickr col­lec­tion assem­bled by the Min­neapo­lis Col­lege of Art and Design.

“In the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, lith­o­g­ra­phers began to use mass-pro­duced zinc plates rather than stones in their print­ing process,” says the accom­pa­ny­ing text. “This inno­va­tion allowed them to pre­pare mul­ti­ple plates, each with a dif­fer­ent col­or ink, and to print these with close reg­is­tra­tion on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of col­ors and vari­ety of sizes could now be pro­duced quick­ly, at mod­est cost.”

Like oth­er of the most fruit­ful tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments of the era, this leap for­ward in poster-print­ing drew the atten­tion, and soon the efforts, of artists: well-regard­ed illus­tra­tors and graph­ic design­ers like Alphonse Mucha, Jules Chéret, Eugène Gras­set, and Hen­ri de Toulouse-Lautrec took to the new method, and “The ‘Gold­en Age of the Poster’ was the spec­tac­u­lar result.”

While many of the best-remem­bered posters of that Gold­en Age come from France, it touched the streets of every major city in west­ern Europe as well as those of Eng­land and Amer­i­ca, all places whose well-heeled pop­u­la­tions found them­selves new­ly and avid­ly inter­est­ed in art, pho­tog­ra­phy, motion pic­tures, mag­a­zines, bicy­cles, auto­mo­biles, absinthe, cof­fee, cig­a­rettes, and world trav­el.

The com­pa­nies behind all those excit­ing things had, of course, to adver­tise, but unlike in ear­li­er times, they could­n’t set­tle for get­ting the word out; they had to use images, and the most vivid ones pos­si­ble at that. They had to use them in such a way as to asso­ciate what they had to offer with the abun­dant spir­it of the time, whether they called that time La Belle Époque, the Wil­helmine peri­od, the late Vic­to­ri­an and Edwar­dian era, or the Gild­ed Age.

All those names, of course, were applied only in ret­ro­spect, after it became clear how bad times could get in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. But then, none of us ever real­ize we’re liv­ing through a gold­en age before it comes to its inevitable end; until that time, best just to enjoy it. You can enter the poster archive here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

Down­load 2,000 Mag­nif­i­cent Turn-of-the-Cen­tu­ry Art Posters, Cour­tesy of the New York Pub­lic Library

René Magritte’s Ear­ly Art Deco Adver­tis­ing Posters, 1924–1927

An Intro­duc­tion to René Magritte, and How the Bel­gian Artist Used an Ordi­nary Style to Cre­ate Extra­or­di­nar­i­ly Sur­re­al Paint­ings

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

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A Lavishly Illustrated Catalog of All Hummingbird Species Known in the 19th Century Gets Restored & Put Online

in Art, Books, Nature | October 12th, 2023

If you don’t live in a part of the world with a lot of hum­ming­birds, it’s easy to regard them as not quite of this earth. With their wide array of shim­mer­ing col­ors and fre­net­ic yet eeri­ly sta­ble man­ner of flight, they can seem like qua­si-fan­tas­ti­cal crea­tures even to those who encounter them in real­i­ty. They cer­tain­ly cap­tured the imag­i­na­tion of Eng­lish ornithol­o­gist John Gould, who between the years of 1849 and 1887 cre­at­ed A Mono­graph of the Trochilidæ, or Fam­i­ly of Hum­ming-Birds, a cat­a­log of all known species of hum­ming­bird at the time. As you might expect, this is just the kind of old book you can peruse at the Inter­net Archive, but now there’s also an online restora­tion that returns Gould’s illus­tra­tions to their orig­i­nal glo­ry.

A Mono­graph of the Trochilidæ “is con­sid­ered one of the finest exam­ples of ornitho­log­i­cal illus­tra­tion ever pro­duced, as well as a sci­en­tif­ic mas­ter­piece,” writes the site’s cre­ator, Nicholas Rougeux (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his dig­i­tal restora­tions of British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy and Euclid­’s Ele­ments).

“Gould’s pas­sion for hum­ming­birds led him to trav­el to var­i­ous parts of the world, such as North Amer­i­ca, Brazil, Colom­bia, Ecuador, and Peru, to observe and col­lect spec­i­mens. He also received many spec­i­mens from oth­er nat­u­ral­ists and col­lec­tors.” Tak­en togeth­er, the work’s five vol­umes — one of them pub­lished as a sup­ple­ment years after his death — cat­a­log 537 species, doc­u­ment­ing their appear­ance with 418 hand-col­ored lith­o­graph­ic plates.

All these images were “ana­lyzed and restored to their orig­i­nal vibrant col­ors in a process that took near­ly 150 hours to com­plete. As much of the orig­i­nal plate was pre­served — includ­ing the del­i­cate col­ors of the scenic back­grounds in each vignette.” You can view and down­load them at the site’s illus­tra­tions page, where they come accom­pa­nied by Gould’s own text and clas­si­fied accord­ing to the same scheme he orig­i­nal­ly used. You may not know your Phaëthor­nis from your Spheno­proc­tus, to say noth­ing of your Cyanomyia from your Smarag­dochry­sis, but after see­ing these small won­ders of the nat­ur­al world as Gould did (all arranged into a chro­mat­ic spec­trum by Rougeux to make a strik­ing poster), you may well find your­self inspired to learn the dif­fer­ences — or at least to put a feed­er out­side your win­dow.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Hum­ming­bird Whis­per­er: Meet the UCLA Sci­en­tist Who Has Befriend­ed 200 Hum­ming­birds

Explore an Inter­ac­tive Ver­sion of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mur­al That Doc­u­ments the Evo­lu­tion of Birds Over 375 Mil­lion Years

What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cor­nell Will Give You the Answer

A Beau­ti­ful­ly Designed Edi­tion of Euclid’s Ele­ments from 1847 Gets Dig­i­tized: Explore the New Online, Inter­ac­tive Repro­duc­tion

Explore an Inter­ac­tive, Online Ver­sion of the Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed, 200-Year-Old British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Artemisia Gentileschi, the Pioneering 17th-Century Female Painter, Outdid Caravaggio with the Striking, Violent Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1620)

in Art, History | October 11th, 2023

Today, the name Judith hard­ly calls to mind a woman capa­ble of great vio­lence. Things seem to have been dif­fer­ent in antiq­ui­ty: “The Bib­li­cal sto­ry from the Book of Judith tells how the beau­ti­ful Israelite wid­ow Judith brave­ly seduces and then kills the sex­u­al­ly aggres­sive Assyr­i­an gen­er­al Holofernes in order to save her peo­ple,” says gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne in the Great Art Explained video above. “It was seen as a sym­bol of tri­umph over tyran­ny, a sort of female David and Goliath.” It thus made the ide­al sub­ject mat­ter for the painter Artemisia Gen­tileschi, who fol­lowed in the foot­steps of her father Orazio Gen­tileschi, and who gained noto­ri­ety at a young age for her involve­ment in a major sex-crime tri­al.

As Rebec­ca Mead writes in the New York­er, “Artemisia was raped by a friend of Orazio’s: the artist Agosti­no Tas­si,” who had been hired to tutor her. Though Tas­si promised to mar­ry her after that and sub­se­quent encoun­ters, he nev­er made good — and indeed mar­ried anoth­er woman — which prompt­ed Orazio Gen­tileschi to seek rec­om­pense for the fam­i­ly’s lost hon­or in court. In our time, “the assault has inevitably, and often reduc­tive­ly, been the lens through which her artis­tic accom­plish­ments have been viewed. The some­times sav­age themes of her paint­ings have been inter­pret­ed as expres­sions of wrath­ful cathar­sis.” This is truer of none of her works than Judith Behead­ing Holofernes, the sub­ject of Payne’s video.

“Even for sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Flo­rence, this paint­ing was unusu­al­ly grue­some,” he says, “and even more unusu­al was that it was paint­ed by a woman.” What’s more, it came a cou­ple of decades after a ren­di­tion of the same Bib­li­cal event by no less a mas­ter than Michelan­ge­lo Merisi da Car­avag­gio. “Car­avag­gio dom­i­nat­ed the art scene in the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, and he was also a good friend of Gen­tileschi’s father,” which means that Artemisia could have received his influ­ence direct­ly. Both of their images of Holofernes’ death at Judith’s hands are “pure Baroque paint­ings: exag­ger­at­ed move­ment, high con­trast light set off by deep dark shad­ows, con­tort­ed fea­tures and vio­lent ges­tures, a focus on the the­atri­cal.”

Yet with its intense phys­i­cal­i­ty — as well as its frank­ness about Judith and her maid­ser­van­t’s con­cen­tra­tion on their mur­der­ous task — Artemisi­a’s paint­ing makes a greater impact on view­ers. Mead notes that it “was for decades hid­den from pub­lic view, pre­sum­ably on the ground that it was dis­taste­ful” and that it moved nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry art his­to­ri­an Anna Brownell Jame­son to wish for “the priv­i­lege of burn­ing it to ash­es.” Though the artist fell into obscu­ri­ty after her death, the cul­ture of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry has ele­vat­ed her out of it: “on art-adja­cent blogs, Artemisia’s strength and occa­sion­al­ly obnox­ious self-assur­ance are held forth as her most essen­tial qual­i­ties. She has become, as the Inter­net term of approval has it, a badass bitch.” Nor has her name hurt her brand. Artemisia: now there’s a for­mi­da­ble-sound­ing woman.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the Paint­ing of Artemisia Gen­tileschi, the First Woman Admit­ted to Florence’s Accad­e­mia di Arte del Dis­eg­no (1593–1653)

A Short Intro­duc­tion to Car­avag­gio, the Mas­ter Of Light

A Space of Their Own, a New Online Data­base, Will Fea­ture Works by 600+ Over­looked Female Artists from the 15th-19th Cen­turies

What Makes Caravaggio’s The Tak­ing of Christ a Time­less, Great Paint­ing?

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Introduction to René Magritte, and How the Belgian Artist Used an Ordinary Style to Create Extraordinarily Surreal Paintings

in Art, History | October 10th, 2023

With his dark suit, neat hair­cut, and bowler hat, René Magritte embod­ied ear­ly-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Bel­gian nor­mal­i­ty. Yet the feel­ings his work stirred in their view­ers were very much the oppo­site of nor­mal. He had var­i­ous ways of accom­plish­ing this. One was “to com­bine two famil­iar objects and make a new one,” says gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above. “Anoth­er method was to paint a sol­id object as if it were a see-through por­tal. In some paint­ings he would defy grav­i­ty and show heavy objects float­ing. He would give an unfa­mil­iar name to famil­iar objects. He would change scale by mak­ing small objects huge and large objects impos­si­bly tiny.”

One of Magrit­te’s par­tic­u­lar­ly effec­tive meth­ods was “to obscure or to hide a face or an object, set­ting up a con­flict between the vis­i­ble that is hid­den and the vis­i­ble that is present.” The pow­er of this tech­nique is vivid­ly show­cased by The Lovers II, from 1928, in which Magritte takes the “cin­e­mat­ic cliché” of the kiss and “dis­rupts our voyeuris­tic plea­sure by cov­er­ing the faces in cloth. A moment of col­lec­tion becomes one of iso­la­tion, of sex­u­al frus­tra­tion. An inti­mate moment becomes some­thing dark and effort­less­ly dis­turb­ing, some­thing hid­den and anony­mous.”

Might this have some­thing to do with the death of his moth­er, who threw her­self in a riv­er when he was young? “When her body was even­tu­al­ly found, a night­dress had been dragged up over her naked body and was cov­er­ing her face.”

The artist him­self would­n’t have thought so. “Psy­chol­o­gy did­n’t inter­est Magritte, who avoid­ed any in-depth inter­pre­ta­tion of his work,” Payne says, and yet his work “offers so much oppor­tu­ni­ty for arm­chair analy­sis.” Employ­ing an “extreme con­trast between the drab­ness of his style and the extra­or­di­nary sub­ject mat­ter,” he demon­strat­ed his under­stand­ing that peo­ple want to see what’s hid­den, that remov­ing what they expect “cre­ates a ten­sion and an anx­i­ety,” and that “if the style of the image does­n’t attract atten­tion, the irra­tional­i­ty of the image becomes even more shock­ing.” Giv­en Magrit­te’s cur­rent stature, it may come as a sur­prise to hear that his paint­ing did­n’t earn him much in his life­time. But giv­en his evi­dent abil­i­ty to manip­u­late view­ers’ thoughts and feel­ings through visu­al means alone, it won’t come as a sur­prise to hear that he made his mon­ey run­ning an adver­tis­ing agency.

Relat­ed con­tent:

René Magritte’s Ear­ly Art Deco Posters (1924–1927)

The Home Movies of Two Sur­re­al­ists: Look Inside the Lives of Man Ray & René Magritte

How Famous Paint­ings Inspired Cin­e­mat­ic Shots in the Films of Taran­ti­no, Gilliam, Hitch­cock & More: A Big Super­cut

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Fantastic Women Of Surrealism: An Introduction

in Art, Gender, Psychology | October 10th, 2023

When André Bre­ton, a leader of the Sur­re­al­ist move­ment and author of its first man­i­festo, wrote that “the prob­lem of woman is the most mar­velous and dis­turb­ing prob­lem in all the world,” he was not allud­ing to the unfair lack of recog­ni­tion expe­ri­enced by his female peers.

Mar­quee name Sur­re­al­ists like Bre­ton, Sal­vador Dalí, Man Ray, René Magritte, and Max Ernst posi­tioned the women in their cir­cle as mus­es and sym­bols of erot­ic fem­i­nin­i­ty, rather than artists in their own right.

As Méret Oppen­heim, sub­ject of a recent ret­ro­spec­tive at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, is seen remark­ing at the out­set of Behind the Mas­ter­piece’s intro­duc­tion to “the fan­tas­tic women of Sur­re­al­ism”, above, it was up to female Sur­re­al­ists to free them­selves of the nar­row­ly defined role soci­ety — and their male coun­ter­parts — sought to impose on them:

A woman isn’t enti­tled to think, to express aggres­sive ideas.

The first artist Behind the Mas­ter­piece pro­files needs no intro­duc­tion. Fri­da Kahlo is sure­ly one of the best known female artists in the world, a woman who played by her own rules, turn­ing to poet­ic, often bru­tal imagery as she delved into her own phys­i­cal and men­tal suf­fer­ing:

I paint self-por­traits, because I paint my own real­i­ty. I paint what I need to. Paint­ing com­plet­ed my life. I lost three chil­dren and paint­ing sub­sti­tut­ed for all of this… I am not sick, I am bro­ken. But I am hap­py to be alive as long as I can paint.

The Nation­al Muse­um of Women in the Arts notes that Reme­dios Varo —  the sub­ject of a cur­rent exhi­bi­tion at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go- and Leono­ra Car­ring­ton “were seen as the ‘femmes-enfants’ to the famous and much old­er male artists in their lives.”

Their friend­ship was ulti­mate­ly more sat­is­fy­ing and far longer last­ing then their roman­tic attach­ments to Sur­re­al­ist lumi­nar­ies Ernst and poet Ben­jamin Péret. Car­ring­ton paid trib­ute to it in her nov­el, The Hear­ing Trum­pet.

The pair’s work reveals a shared inter­est in alche­my, astrol­o­gy and the occult, approach­ing them from char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent angles, as per Ste­fan van Raay, author of Sur­re­al Friends: Leono­ra Car­ring­ton, Reme­dios Varo, and Kati Hor­na:

Carrington’s work is about tone and col­or and Varo’s is about line and form.

The name of Dorothea Tan­ning, like that of Leono­ra Car­ring­ton, is often linked to Max Ernst, though she made no bones about her desire to keep her artis­tic iden­ti­ty sep­a­rate from that of her hus­band of 30 years.

Her work evolved sev­er­al times over the course of a career span­ning sev­en decades, but her first major muse­um sur­vey was a posthu­mous one.

Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge art his­to­ry pro­fes­sor, Alyce Mahon, co-cura­tor of that Tate Mod­ern exhib­it, touch­es on the nature of Tanning’s decep­tive­ly fem­i­nine soft sculp­tures:

If I asked for two words that you asso­ciate with pin cush­ions, you would say sewing and craft, and you would asso­ciate those with the female in the house. Tan­ning played with the idea of wife­ly skills and took a very hum­ble object and turned it into a fetish. She craft­ed her first one out of vel­vet in 1965 and ran­dom­ly placed pins in it and aligned it with a voodoo doll. She says it ‘bris­tles’ with images. So she takes some­thing fab­u­lous­ly famil­iar and makes it uncan­ny and strange to encour­age us to think dif­fer­ent­ly.

Tan­ning reject­ed the label of ‘woman artist’, view­ing it as “just as much a con­tra­dic­tion in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘ele­phant artist’.”

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Sig­mund Freud!

The famed psychoanalyst’s con­cept of the sub­con­scious mind was cen­tral to Sur­re­al­ism, but he also wrote that “women oppose change, receive pas­sive­ly, and add noth­ing of their own.”

One won­ders what he would have made of Object, the fur lined teacup, saucer and spoon that is Oppenheim’s best known work, for bet­ter or worse.

In an essay for Khan Academy’s AP/College Art His­to­ry course Josh Rose describes how Muse­um of Mod­ern Art patrons declared it the “quin­tes­sen­tial” Sur­re­al­ist object when it was fea­tured in the influ­en­tial 1936–37 exhi­bi­tion “Fan­tas­tic Art, Dada, and Sur­re­al­ism:”

But for Oppen­heim, the pres­tige and focus on this one object proved too much, and she spent more than a decade out of the artis­tic lime­light, destroy­ing much of the work she pro­duced dur­ing that peri­od. It was only lat­er when she re-emerged, and began pub­licly show­ing new paint­ings and objects with renewed vig­or and con­fi­dence, that she began reclaim­ing some of the intent of her work. When she was giv­en an award for her work by the City of Basel, she touched upon this in her accep­tance speech, (say­ing,) “I think it is the duty of a woman to lead a life that express­es her dis­be­lief in the valid­i­ty of the taboos that have been imposed upon her kind for thou­sands of years. Nobody will give you free­dom; you have to take it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent

Dis­cov­er Leono­ra Car­ring­ton, Britain’s Lost Sur­re­al­ist Painter

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life and Work of Fri­da Kahlo

The For­got­ten Women of Sur­re­al­ism: A Mag­i­cal, Short Ani­mat­ed Film


– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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